The 2nd Biggest Lie:JFK & Vietnam/2
n...@blythe.org
From: n...@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: n...@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
From: M.MOR...@ASCO.central.de (Mike Morrissey)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 93 04:44:20 +0100
THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE
by Michael Morrissey
Part 2 of 3
In JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1984), Herbert Parmet mentions both the White House statement and
the McNamara-Taylor report, but in a way that makes the two
documents seem totally unrelated to each other. Of the White
House announcement Parmet says only:
"On October 2 the White House announced that a thousand men would
be withdrawn by the end of the year" (p. 333).
The larger plan to withdraw all troops by 1965 is not mentioned at
all. This is particularly misleading when followed by this
statement:
"[Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell] Gilpatric later stated that
McNamara did indicate to him that the withdrawal was part of the
President's plan to wind down the war, but, that was too far in
the future" (p. 333).
Who is the author of the last part of this sentence, Gilpatric or
Parmet? In any case, the end of 1965 was only two years away--
hardly "far in the future," much less "too far," whatever that
means.
Parmet continues:
"Ken O'Donnell has been the most vigorous advocate of the argument
that the President was planning to liquidate the American stake
right after the completion of the 1964 elections would have made
it politically possible" (p. 336).
This reduces the fact that Kennedy planned to withdraw, documented
in the White House statement and in NSAM 263 and 273, to the
status of an argument "advocated" by O'Donnell. This clearly
misrepresents O'Donnell's account as well as the documentary
record. O'Donnell does not argue that Kennedy wanted to pull out;
he quotes Kennedy's own words, uttered in his presence. It is not
a matter of interpretation or surmise. Either Kennedy said what
O'Donnell says he said, or O'Donnell is a liar. As for the
documentary record, in addition to misrepresenting the White House
statement, Parmet, like Karnow and Schlesinger, completely ignores
NSAM 263 and 273.
Parmet devotes the bulk of his discussion to the purely
hypothetical question of what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam
if he had lived. Parmet's answer: "It is probable that not even
he was sure." This again flies in the face what we know. Kennedy
knew what he wanted to do: withdraw. If Parmet's contention is
that he would have changed his mind, had he lived, and reversed
his withdrawal policy (as Johnson did), that is another matter.
Parmet is trying to make us believe that it is not clear that
Kennedy wanted to withdraw in the first place, which is plainly
wrong.
The hypothetical question is answered by O'Donnell and Powers, who
were in a much better position to speculate than Parmet or anyone
else, as follows:
"All of us who listened to President Kennedy's repeated
expressions of his determination to avoid further involvement in
Vietnam are sure that if he had lived to serve a second term, the
numbers of American military advisers and technicians in that
country would have steadily decreased. He never would have
committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against
the Viet Cong" (p. 383).
Parmet says that for JFK "to have withdrawn at any point short of
a clear-cut settlement would have been most unlikely" (p. 336).
But "a clear-cut settlement" could range from Johnson's aim "to
win" the war to Kennedy's more vaguely expressed aim "to support
the efforts of the people of that country [South Vietnam] to
defeat aggression and to build a peaceful and free society" (White
House statement, Oct. 2, 1963).
Parmet cites Sorensen as affirming Kennedy's desire to find a
solution "other than a retreat or abandonment of our commitment."
This was in fact the solution that the withdrawal plan offered:
our mission is accomplished; it's their war now. Parmet quotes
from the speech Kennedy was supposed to deliver in Dallas the day
he was killed, as if empty rhetoric like "we dare not weary of the
test" [of supplying assistance to other nations] contradicted his
withdrawal plan. He also cites Dean Rusk, who said in a 1981
interview that "at no time did he [Kennedy] even whisper any such
thing [about withdrawal] to his own secretary of state." If that
is true, Rusk knew less than the rest of the nation, who were
informed by the White House statement on Oct. 2. Finally, Parmet
quotes Robert Kennedy as saying that his brother "felt that South
Vietnam was worth keeping for psychological and political reasons
'more than anything else,'" as if this supported Parmet's
argumentthat JFK was fully committed to defending that corrupt
dictatorship. But RFK could well have meant that means South
Vietnam was not worth keeping if it meant the US going to war--
just the opposite of Parmet's interpretation.
Despite Kenneth O'Donnell's clearly expressed opinion in his 1970
memoir, Parmet manages to have him saying the opposite in a 1976
interview:
"When Ken O'Donnell was pressed about whether the President's
decision to withdraw meant that he would have undertaken the
escalation that followed in 1965, the position became qualified.
Kennedy, said O'Donnell, had not faced the same level of North
Vietnamese infiltration as did President Johnson, thereby implying
that he, too, would have responded in a similar way under those
conditions" (p. 336).
Now--who said what, exactly? If we read carefully, it is clear
that it is Parmet who is "qualifying" O'Donnell's position, and
Parmet who is telling us what O'Donnell is "implying"--not
O'Donnell.
John Ranelagh, a British journalist and author of what is widely
considered an "authoritative" (i.e. sanitized) history of the CIA,
describes Kennedy as
"...a committed cold warrior, absolutely determined to prevent
further communist expansion and in 1963 still smarting from the
Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and the Cuban missile crisis. It
was time to go on the offensive, show these communists what the
United States could do if it put its mind to it, and Vietnam
seemed the right place. It was an arrogance, born of ignorance of
what the world really was like, assuming that American energy and
power, applied with conviction, would change an essentially
passive world. At the fateful moment, when the United States
could have disengaged itself from Vietnam without political
embarrassment, there was a President in the White House looking
for opportunities to assert American strength.
"Kennedy wondered during 1963 whether he was in fact right in
deciding that Vietnam was the place for the exercise of this
strength, and some of his close associates subsequently were
convinced that he would have pulled out had he lived. But his own
character and domestic political considerations militated against
this actually happening. In 1964 the Republican presidential
candidate, Barry Goldwater, ran on a strong prowar plank, and it
would not have suited Kennedy--just as it did not suit Johnson--to
face the electorate with the promise of complete disengagement.
In addition, in September 1963 McNamara was promising Kennedy that
with the proper American effort the war in Vietnam would be won by
the end of 1965. No one was listening to the CIA or its analysts"
(The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, NY: Touchstone,
1987, p. 420; emphasis added).
Ranelagh not only ignores Kennedy's withdrawal decision "at the
fateful moment," he transforms it into a desire "to assert
strength," and has Kennedy pursuing the buildup for "domestic
political considerations." (This is precisely opposite to Karnow's
assumption, discussed above.) In the sentence beginning "In
addition...", Ranelagh manages to "interpret" McNamara- Taylor's
recommendation to pull out of Vietnam as an argument for Kennedy
to stay in!
Ranelagh's opinion that "no one was listening to the CIA,"
implying that the CIA was pessimistic about the war in 1963,
contradicts what he says a few pages earlier: "The Pentagon
Papers...showed, apart from the earliest period in 1963-64, the
agency's analysis was consistently pessimistic about U.S.
involvement..." (p. 417, my emphasis). This is the familiar "lone
voice in the wilderness" image of the CIA: only they were
"intelligent" enough to read the writing on the wall. But if that
is true, why did the agency try so hard (from 1954 to 1964) to get
us involved in the first place, and why did they continue
tosupport the war effort in clandestine operations throughout?
The CIA's Ray Cline says (as quoted by Ranelagh):
McCone [CIA Director under Kennedy and Johnson] and I talked a lot
about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and we both agreed in
advising that intervention there would pay only if the United
States was prepared to engage in a long, difficult process of
nation-building in South Vietnam to create the political and
economic strength to resist a guerrilla war (p. 420).
Ranelagh intreprets this as evidence that the CIA wanted to
withdraw from Vietnam in 1963. Nonsense. No one in the top
echelons of the CIA, least of all Director John McCone, supported
Kennedy's withdrawal plan in 1963. Nor does Cline's remark imply
this. He is saying that the CIA's opinion (i.e. one of their
opinions) was that to be "successful," the US would have to dig in
for the long haul. I think the "long haul" is precisely what the
CIA wanted, and precisely what Kennedy decided he did not want.
That is why he decided to withdraw. Clearly, more powerful forces
than Kennedy himself combined to make the intervention "pay" as
the Johnson administration proceeded to engage in that "long,
difficult process of nation-building" that generated hundreds of
billions of dollars for the warmongers, destroying millions of
lives in the process.
Neil Sheehan, one of the editors of the NYT Pentagon Papers and
the author of another acclaimed history of the war (A Bright
Shining Lie, London: Picador, 1990), devotes exactly one sentence
in 861 pages to the crucial White House statement of Oct. 2, and
not a single word to NSAM 263 or 273. His view is consistent:
the generals, except for a few, like John Paul Vann (the
biographical subject of the book), were incredibly stupid to think
the war was being won by our side, but Kennedy was even more
stupid because he believed them. The McNamara-Taylor report is
presented as the height of naivety, which, Sheehan adds
sarcastically,
"...recommended pulling out 1,000 Americans by the end of 1963 in
order to demonstrate how well the plans for victory were being
implemented. The White House announced a forthcoming withdrawal
of this first 1,000 men" (p. 366).
But "The President," Sheehan says, "gained no peace of mind." He
was "confused" and "angry" at the conflicting reports. In other
words, according to Sheehan, the withdrawal plan reflects nothing
but Kennedy's "confusion" and misjudgement of the situation, based
on the equally false evaluation of his Secretary of State and top
military adviser.
As for the CIA, Sheehan, like Ranelagh, says the "analysts at the
CIA told him [Kennedy] that Saigon's military position was
deteriorating..." (p. 366). But Kennedy was too "confused" to
understand this, and ordered withdrawal on the false assumption
that the war was going well.
All of these studies bend over backward to avoid recognizing the
documented fact that Kennedy had decided to withdraw from Vietnam
by the end of 1965. The tactics of avoidance vary from
ignoringthe existence of any withdrawal plan at all to attributing
it to wishful thinking, political expedience, or sheer stupidity
and naivety.
At the same time, commentators are quick to remember the two TV
interviews JFK gave in September 1963 (Documents on American
Foreign Relations, pp. 292-295). On Sept. 2 he told Walter
Cronkite of CBS: "But I don't agree with those who say we should
withdraw. That would be a great mistake." A week later he said to
David Brinkley on NBC:
"What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient
and say, because they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they
don't like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw.
That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should
stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we
can, but we should not withdraw."
If any statements of that time frame were designed for political
effect, these TV interviews were. Presidents are far more likely
to play politics in television interviews than in official policy
statements and Nation Security Action Memoranda. These remarks
must be seen as coming from a president who was up for re-election
in one year and who knew he would "be damned everywhere as a
Communist appeaser" if he withdrew from Vietnam, as he had told
Ken O'Donnell a few months earlier.
Those who take the "we should not withdraw" sentence as Kennedy's
final word on the matter do not point out that it is directly
contradicted by the White House policy statement and NSAM 263 the
following month. Either Kennedy changed his mind or -- more
likely -- the earlier public statements were meant to appease the
pro-war forces. He also changed his mind about aid to South
Vietnam:
Mr. Huntley: Are we likely to reduce our aid to South Vietnam now?
The President: I don't think that would be helpful at this time.
Whatever Kennedy meant by this in September, he thought and did
the opposite in October, implementing the McNamara-Taylor
recommendations for aid reduction in addition to troop reductions.
Kennedy also said in the Cronkite interview:
"In the final analysis, it is their [the South Vietnamese] war.
They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help
them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as
advisers, but they have to win it--the people of Vietnam--against
the Communists. We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I
don't think that the war can be won unless the people support the
effort, and, in my opinion, in the last two months the government
has gotten out of touch with the people."
He repeats this, almost verbatim, a few sentences later, obviously
intent on emphasizing the point:
"...in the final analysis it is the people and the government [of
South Vietnam] who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can
do is help, and we are making it very clear. But I don't
agreewith those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great
mistake."
In context, Kennedy may have been using the word "withdraw" here
in the sense of "abandon." "Abandoning" Vietnam completely would
indeed have been bad politics, but reducing aid (to force a change
in Diem's policy) and withdrawing troops is not necessarily the
same thing.
Similarly, in the NBC interview, before Kennedy says "we should
not withdraw," he says:
"We have some influence, and we are attempting to carry it out. I
think we don't--we can't expect these countries to do everything
the way we want to do them [sic]. They have their own interest,
their own personalities, their own tradition. We can't make
everyone in our image, and there are a good many people who don't
want to go in our image....We would like to have Cambodia,
Thailand, and South Vietnam all in harmony, but there are ancient
differences there. We can't make the world over, but we can
influence the world."
This does not sound like a strong commitment. As a whole, these
remarks are perhaps more accurately interpreted as: "We won't
abandon them, but we won't do their fighting for them either."
This is an interpretation, but a plausible one.
Despite the massive efforts to obscure it, the fact remains, and
cannot be overemphasized, that Johnson reversed the withdrawal
policy. The curious thing is that one hardly ever finds this fact
plainly stated by those who should (and perhaps do) know better.
Richard Goodwin, an adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson, is a rare
exception:
"In later years Johnson and others in his administration would
assert that they were merely fulfilling the commitment of previous
American presidents. The claim was untrue--even though it was
made by men, like Bundy and McNamara, who were more anxious to
serve the wishes of their new master than the memory of their dead
one. During the first half of 1965 I attended meetings,
participated in conversations, where the issues of escalation were
discussed. Not once did any participant claim that we had to bomb
or send combat troops because of "previous commitments," that
these steps were the inevitable extension of past policies. They
were treated as difficult and serious decisions to be made solely
on the basis of present conditions and perceptions. The claim of
continuity was reserved for public justification; intended to
conceal the fact that a major policy change was being made--that
"their" war was becoming "our" war" (Remembering America, NY:
Harper & Row, 1988, p. 373; emphasis added).
4. Reactions to Oliver Stone's JFK
Why do other historians find this observation by Goodwin so
difficult to make? Because to acknowledge the fact of a major
policy change in Vietnam means to acknowledge the possibility that
the president was killed in order to effect this change.
Since this is precisely the thesis of Oliver Stone's JFK, it is
not surprising to see that the critics have followed the same
avoidance tactics.
The Wall Street Journal refers to the putative connection with
Vietnam policy--which is the main point of the film--only
obliquely, halfway through the review:
"We further agree that November 1963 was a turning point in the
American commitment to Vietnam. But the key was not the
assassination of JFK but the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem three
weeks earlier. Once President Kennedy gave the go-ahead for a
coup against an allied government in the name of winning the war,
the U.S. was deeply committed indeed. Lyndon Johnson, who had
opposed the coup, was left to pick up the pieces" (12/27/91, p.
A10).
The crucial fact presented in the film--that Johnson reversed
Kennedy's withdrawal plan--is not even mentioned.
Time refers, also indirectly and buried midway in the article, to
the portrayal of Kennedy's Vietnam policy as a figment of the
imaginations of "the last misty-eyed believers in Camelot":
"They still hold to the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's
JFK: a Galahad-like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister
right-wing military-industrial complex to bring the troops home,
ban the Bomb and ensure racial equality on the home front--a
Kennedy killed because he was just too good to live" (European
ed., 1/13/92, p. 39)
Here the word Vietnam does not even appear, and "bringing the
troops home" is presented as only one of several equally mythical
Kennedy objectives. Whether banning the Bomb and ensuring racial
equality were on Kennedy's agenda is debatable, but his decision
to bring the troops home is not, or should not be.
In an article entitled "Does Stone's JFK Murder the Truth?"
(International Herald Tribune, 12/17/91, reprinted from the New
York Times), Tom Wicker writes--also about halfway through--that
according to Stone and Garrison Kennedy "seemed to question" the
goals of those who "wanted the war in Vietnam to be fought and the
United States to stand tall and tough against the Soviets..."
This not only reduces Kennedy's withdrawal decision to a"question"
but implies that even that is not certain: he did not decide, he
questioned, that is, he seemed to question.
Iain Johnstone tells readers of the Sunday Times (1/26/91, Sect.
6, pp. 12-13), again at mid-point position in his article, that
the idea that Kennedy was "about to let down the military and
munitions men by pulling out of Vietnam" is "doubtful." The only
thing that is doubtful here is whether Johnstone has bothered to
read the documents.
On the last page of a seven-page article in GQ (Jan. 1992, p. 75),
Nicholas Lemann finally confronts Garrison's and Stone's main
thesis by referring not to the documents but to a 1964 interview
with Robert Kennedy. This is apparently the same 1964 interview
cited by Herbert Parmet (discussed above). I have not been able
to consult the original material, which is part of an oral history
collection at the JFK Library in Boston, but it is interesting
that Lehmann cuts off the quotation at a strategic point.
Interviewer: Did the president feel that we would have to go into
Vietnam in a big way?
RFK: We certainly considered what would be the result if you
abandon Vietnam, even Southeast Asia, and whether it was
worthwhile trying to keep and hold on to.
Interviewer: What did he say? What did he think?
RFK: He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile...
This has to be a deliberate misrepresentation. The ellipsis
conceals what we know from Parmet's citation:
"As Bobby Kennedy later said, his brother had reached the point
where he felt that South Vietnam was worth keeping for
psychological and political reasons 'more than anything else.'"
(Parmet, p. 336).
Piecing these two parts of RFK's remark together, the complete
sentence would seem to have been:
"He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile for
psychological and political reasons more than anything else."
As I have already mentioned, "it was worthwhile" in this context
more likely meant "it was not worthwhile" (psychological and
political reasons hardly justifying a war), especially since we
know, just as Robert knew, that President Kennedy had decided to
terminate US military participation by the end of 1965.
The German reviews of JFK, though they generally take Stone's
thesis more seriously than the American ones, are equally evasive
on the point of Kennedy's Vietnam policy. Several long articles
do not mention it at all (Kurt Kister, Süddeutsche Zeitung,
1/22/92, p. 8; Verena Lueken, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
1/24/92, p. 29). Peter Buchka in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
(1/23/92, p. 10) mentions only that "a withdrawal from Vietnam,"
according to Garrison and Stone, would have deprived the weapons
industry of gigantic profits. Peter Körte in the Frankfurter
Rundschau (1/24/92, p. 22) notes that President Kennedy "said he
would withdraw the troops from Vietnam if he was reelected," which
is only half the truth. The only German critic who even mentions
NSAM 263, Rolf Paasch, the American correspondent for the (Berlin)
Tageszeitung, questions Stone's "interpretation" of it:
"Whether his [JFK's] hints in 1963 about a withdrawal of US
military advisers from Vietnam really demonstrated the conversion
of a Cold Warrior, as Stone interprets on the basis of NSAM 263,
cited in the film, or whether it was only opportunistic rhetoric
aimed at his liberal supporters, is unclear" (1/23/92, p. 18).
Here we are presented with two alternatives: NSAM 263 demonstrates
either that Kennedy was a "converted Cold Warrior" or a liar. The
possibility that he remained a Cold Warrior who just didn't feel
like sacrificing thousands of American lives in Vietnam is not
even considered. Why Paasch feels a clearly expressed
presidential policy directive can be characterized as a "hint,"
why it requires "interpretation," and why he feels at liberty to
question its sincerity, he does not say. It is clear that he has
done his research by relying on the "interpretations" of American
scholars like the ones we have discussed rather than on the prima
facie documentary evidence.
Der Spiegel mentions Kennedy's Vietnam policy in the form of a
rhetorical question: "In the weeks preceding the assassination,
didn't he think about withdrawing the advisers from Vietnam?"
(12/16/92, p. 192). If presidents issued NSAMs every time they
"think about" something, the world would be a good deal more
confused than it is.
In a box entitled "Was It [the assassination] a Plot to Keep the
U.S. in Vietnam?" Time says that in Stone's movie Kennedy had
"secret plans to withdraw from Vietnam" (2/3/92, European ed., p.
63). There was nothing secret about the White House statement on
Oct. 2 or the press conference on Oct. 31, and the confirmation of
the withdrawal plan at the conference in Honolulu was reported in
the New York Times on Nov. 21, 1963. Certainly the withdrawal
plan was not a secret within the Kennedy administration.
Then, magnanimously offering to set the record straight by
presenting "the evidence," Time says:
"Kennedy confided to certain antiwar Senators that he planned to
withdraw from Vietnam if re-elected, but publicly he proclaimed
his opposition to withdrawal. In October 1963 he signed a
National Security Action Memo--NSAM 263--that ordered the
withdrawal of 1,000 of the 16,000 or so U.S. military "advisers."
"After the assassination, Lyndon Johnson let the 1,000-man
withdrawal proceed, but it was diluted so that it involved mainly
individuals due for rotation rather than entire combat units. A
few days after taking office, he signed a new action memo--NSAM
273--that was tougher than a version Kennedy had been considering;
it permitted more extensive covert military actions against North
Vietnam. No one has come forward, however, with any direct
knowledge of a military or CIA conspiracy."
This is a good example of gray propaganda--the half-truth.
Kennedy's "opposition to withdrawal" is construed -- probably
falsely -- from the September television interviews. The second
half of this truth is that Kennedy publicly proclaimed the
opposite--his intention to withdraw--in the Oct. 2 White House
statement, of which Time conveniently omits mention. Similarly,
Time tells us only half of what is in NSAM 263, leaving out the
more important half, which implemented Kennedy's plan to remove
all US troops--not just 1,000--by the end of 1965.
What does the reference to Johnson's NSAM 273 as "tougher than a
version Kennedy had been considering" mean? If the "Kennedy
version" was Bundy's Nov. 21 draft of 273, this is wrong, because
Kennedy never saw that draft, much less approved it.
Continued in Part 3...
+ Join Us! Support The NY Transfer News Collective +
+ We deliver uncensored information to your mailbox! +
+ Modem:718-448-2358 Fax:718-448-3423 E-mail: n...@blythe.org +